Chapter 3 PANIC IMPROVISATION.

The brass doorknob turned all the way with a metallic clack. The wooden door was yanked open, vomiting a cone of raw, white light that blinded us instantly.

My brain bypassed all logic. State prison bars flashed in my mind. It was either jail or absolute insanity. I chose the latter.

I grabbed the tuxedo idiot's face with both hands, dug my fingers into his tense jaw, and yanked him down with everything I had. I smashed my mouth against his with the delicacy of a head-on collision at sixty miles an hour.

The impact was brutal. Our teeth clashed with a dry crack that made me see sparks behind my eyelids. Sharp pain ripped through my lower lip, immediately followed by the unmistakable hot, metallic taste of blood.

The guy went stiff as an ironing board. His hands, which seconds ago were ready to shove or strangle me, froze in mid-air, hovering at my waist. He let out a choked sound, a nasal grunt of pure panic, and tried to pull back.

I dug my nails into the nape of his neck, anchoring myself to his gelled hair, and deepened the damn kiss. It had to look real. It had to look dirty, desperate, the kind of clandestine hookup high society pulls when they think nobody is watching.

The flashlight beam trembled over our mashed faces.

"Hey! Freeze! Hands in the air!" a thick voice roared from the hallway.

I broke the kiss with a backward jerk, gasping, blinking against the blinding beam. The tuxedo guy beside me was breathing like he’d just run a marathon; his eyes were bugging out, his perfectly styled hair now wrecked by my fingers, and a smear of my blood painted the corner of his pale lips. He looked ready to suffer a massive coronary.

I brought the back of my hand to my mouth, faking embarrassment, while my mind worked at lightspeed.

"For heaven's sake!" I shrieked in a high, scandalized pitch, crossing my arms over my chest to cover the torn dress. "Does nobody in this place understand the concept of basic privacy?"

The security guard lowered the flashlight a couple of inches, blinking in a daze. He was a beefy guy, face flushed from sprinting. He looked at the utility closet, looked at us, and then turned his head toward the apocalyptic disaster in the next room, where the porcelain shepherdess lay shredded into a thousand pieces on the parquet.

"What the hell are you doing in a restricted area?" the guard demanded, a hand dropping to the baton on his belt. "Did you break that?"

My supposed lover remained mute, paralyzed, staring at a blind spot on the wall. If I relied on him to speak, we were fried. I gave him a discreet but violent stomp on the shoe. He flinched, letting out a soft whimper.

"Break what?" I lied with the deadest pan I could muster, adjusting my cleavage with feigned outrage. "We were... looking for the powder room. The gala is packed with insufferable people. My fiancé and I just wanted a moment alone. We got backed into a corner here, heard a hideous noise outside, and hid out of fright."

The guard narrowed his eyes. Clearly, he wasn't making minimum wage to be an idiot. He scanned my wrinkled dress, my bare foot—because the broken shoe was still lying out in the hallway—and then scanned the robotic posture of the guy next to me.

"That door has an electronic lock. How did you get in?"

"It was open," I fired back instantly, without hesitating. "Terrible security, if you ask me. I’m going to mention it to the organizers. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to freshen up and get back to the party."

I tried to take a step into the hall, dragging the human mannequin with me by the tuxedo sleeve.

The guard cut me off, extending an arm thick as a tree trunk.

"Nobody moves."

He brought the shoulder radio to his lips, never taking his eyes off us. Cold panic settled in my gut.

"Control three here. I have a code red in the Temporary Exhibition Room. Two intruders. A high-value piece destroyed. Get me Mrs. Vanderbilt-Hayes immediately."

The guy next to me swallowed so hard I saw his Adam's apple bob violently. The taste of blood in my mouth suddenly turned much more bitter. This wasn't a security guard problem anymore; they had just summoned the owner of hell.

They forced us out of the closet at flashlight-point and lined us up against the corridor wall. Ten eternal minutes passed. Ten minutes where the silence was only broken by the hum of the alarms, which had already been muted in the rest of the building so as not to spook the guests. The tuxedo guy stared at the floor, pale as marble, muttering unintelligible curses under his breath. We didn't even dare lock eyes. The hostility between us was a magnetic field ready to blow.

Then, we heard the sound.

The rhythmic, sharp, lethal click of heels approaching down the hall.

Matriarch Eleanor Vanderbilt-Hayes appeared around the corner, flanked by two men in black suits built like brick outhouses. She wore an emerald evening gown that probably cost more than the entire hospital treating my brother. Her white hair was pulled back in a flawless chignon. She wasn't running, she wasn't sweating, she didn't even look fazed. She radiated the aura of someone who can destroy lives with a simple swipe of her credit card.

Eleanor stopped in front of the wrecked room. She looked at the remains of the porcelain shepherdess for three long seconds. Then, she slowly turned her face toward us. Her gray eyes, sharp as scalpels, scanned me from my messed-up hair down to my bare foot.

I felt her skinning me alive with a look.